For those of us who have committed ourselves to the Christian faith, the death of Jesus Christ of Nazareth on a cross stands as the single most important event of all human history. The New Testament over and over characterizes Jesus’ sufferings on the cross as the critical moment in God’s work of salvation for humanity. For example, according to the apostle Paul, the cross was the central content of his preaching. Similarly, from the way the Gospels are written, it is clear that Jesus himself, and those who first wrote about the life of Jesus, interpreted his death on the cross as the key event towards which his whole life moved. If this event is as important as those closest to it thought, then no one is going to be able to understand it in a final, once-for-all way. But it is possible to grow in understanding in a way that enhances your relationship with God and yourself and others. In this paper I share some thoughts about the death of Jesus and what it means for God to help us through that event. I will use a certain “way in” to talking about this topic, which is to pose the awkward question, “Who killed Jesus?”
I’m not talking here about the Roman soldiers, of course. They were acting under orders. I’m not even talking about Pilate (who gave the orders) or the Jewish religious leaders and the crowd that supposedly manipulated Pilate into giving the orders. I’m talking in bigger terms, world-sized terms, if you like. What I mean by talking in world-sized terms is discussing realities that are beyond ordinary experience and so are too profound to talk about in an ordinary way. The “suspects” I want to question are thus not normal murder suspects, but the major characters in the overall story of the world according to Christianity. Someone else may have some other candidates, but I will only consider three, three that have been proposed a lot in the history of Christian theology: Satan, God, and Us (the human race). By the way, I am going to restrict my discussion to the Bible in this essay, rather than drawing in what various traditional Christian or other sources say, for the sake of brevity.
Satan
Satan has been implicitly blamed for killing Jesus by some people. Certain preachers (such as E.W. Kenyon, father of the “Word of Faith” movement) say Jesus was subjected to Satan’s power on the cross so that we would be released from Satan’s power. Their explanation of the death of Jesus goes something like this: Satan’s forces reigned over Jesus (and killed him) so that we could reign over Satan. Thus, for example, they picture demons gleefully mobbing Jesus when they read of wild beasts attacking the suffering person of Psalm 22. Some go on to say that Jesus then turned the tables on Satan and “whipped him” in the netherworld (so says Kenneth Copeland). There is a simple and foolproof way to test whether these sorts of ideas stem from the Bible: look in a Bible concordance under Satan and the Devil and so on, and see whether he is ever said to have killed Jesus. But you won’t find any such thing. It does say, for example, in John 13:2 that the devil put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot to betray Jesus. But that is Satan in his classic role as tempter. As always, he suggests the idea of sin to human beings, and they either tell him to get lost or they accept his suggestion and do the sin because they have the same destructive nature as he has. John 8:44 says Satan has been a murderer from the beginning, and that those who join him in that murderousness are showing a family likeness—a family likeness to his hatred for other creatures and for God, for which they are no less responsible than he is. So Satan may be imagined as partner to the conspiracy to kill Jesus, for that would only be true to his biblical character. But that doesn’t in itself make him the key perpetrator. For that, we’d need a statement that Satan killed Jesus, which we never once get.
For example, Hebrews 2:14 says that Jesus died in order that the devil, who holds the power of death, might be destroyed. But it doesn’t say that Satan killed Jesus or that Jesus came under his power. Jesus himself implies something entirely different when he says in John 14:30 that “the ruler of this world is coming, but he has nothing in me—but that the world may know that I love the father and do all that he tells me…” Jesus’ statement implies that what is about to happen (his arrest and crucifixion at the hands of human beings) is not because he has fallen under Satan’s dominion, but because he is following his Father’s instructions.
In another example, the vision of Rev. 12:4-5, a dragon (symbolizing Satan) tries to eat a newborn heavenly child (possibly symbolizing Jesus), but the child is not killed by him, but is caught away to God’s throne.
Summary. Throughout the New Testament, there is plenty of language about the death of Jesus, and none of it says that Satan is the one who killed Jesus, or that Jesus came under his power.
God
God the Father punished Jesus on the cross for our sins. So God is the one who killed Jesus. If this idea sounds familiar, that’s because it is perhaps the most common understanding of the cross. The idea is this: God hates for people to disobey, and when they do, they have to be punished in order to quench God’s holy wrath. God is so insistent on absolute obedience that in God’s terms it is fair punishment to kill and chastise forever any created being that disobeys God. But if God did that to us all, where would the human race be? None of us would stand a chance. For the gap between God’s standards of holiness and perfection on the one hand, and our total sinfulness, on the other hand, create a major problem. God wants at least some chosen human beings to come around to a place of worshipping and serving God, so God deals with God’s wrath towards us sinners by sending God’s own son to stand in for us. God creates a way (the incarnation) for Jesus to become vulnerable to the punishment we deserve (rejection, wrath, death), and God then sends Jesus to experience it on our behalf. The picture being suggested is God throwing all our sins on Jesus, covering him with our unacceptability and leaving him there, destroyed as a human being, like a man smothered beneath a giant pile of toxic, rotting garbage. I encountered this typical explanation on the internet:
And as we know, God is Holy and being Holy He cannot face sin. So when the sin of the world was upon Christ, God for the first and the last time turned His face away from Jesus for He could not see Him. Sin had separated Jesus from God as it had with us. In other words, the presence of God the Father had departed from Him. This proved that Jesus felt like any other mortal man. If we have sin, God cannot be in our presence. So for the first time, being in great pain and being the most lonely man on earth now, He cried out with His last breath,” God, God why has thou forsaken me.”
I’d like to stop here and say that this person’s explanation of Jesus’ death on the cross, despite being typical, is unbiblical, and in fact completely ignores the central explanation of Jesus’ death that is offered over and over again in the New Testament. As biblical interpreters often point out, it is hazardous to base a whole theology on an obscure or difficult passage. And I suppose that it is fair to say that the words, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” constitute just about the most difficult single sentence between Genesis 1:1 and Revelation 22:21. So, in our interpretation we have to proceed where possible from the clear to the difficult, from teaching material to story material, and from the New Testament to the Old Testament. And when we look in the teaching materials of the New Testament and their explanations for the death of Jesus Christ, we find a unified and clear pattern. The New Testament, offering a wealth of references to the death of Jesus Christ and its meaning, never once says that God put Jesus to death for us, or that God punished Jesus in our place, or that God abandoned or shunned Jesus on the cross. Those who are surprised by this should get out pen, paper and a concordance and see for themselves.
In fact, Hebrews 5:7 says the opposite: that Jesus prayed to God the Father to save him from death, and his prayer was heard because of his reverence. Certainly it is said that Jesus died for us, that he took the punishment we deserved on himself. The Bible also says that he did this in obedience to the Father, and in the plan of the Father. But saying these things raises, rather than answers, the question of at whose hands he suffered the punishment he received. Many Christians, including some of the most well-known theologians, read the Scripture with an unhealthy view of God’s nature, and they fill in things that are not spoken with their own preconceived ideas. Let’s have a fresh look at the Scriptures and see if we can discover the real culprit in the murder of Jesus Christ.
Who Killed Jesus? Part 2: Getting the Story Straight
Where can we find a kernel of clear New Testament teaching about who was responsible for the death of Jesus? I propose that we start with Peter. He says,
. . .For it is a good thing, if, because of mindfulness towards God, one experiences the sorrow of suffering unjustly. For what good is it if you do wrong and are beaten for it, and take it patiently? But when you do right and suffer for it and take it patiently, this is valued by God. For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps. He committed no sin, he told no lies, and when he was insulted he did not insult in return, and when he was suffering he didn’t threaten. Instead, he kept entrusting himself to the one who judges justly. It was he who took our sins and bore them himself in his own body on the wood [of the cross], in order that we might be dead to sins and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed. For you were straying like sheep, but now you have returned to the Shepherd and Guardian of your lives. (1 Pet. 2:19-25)
Who rejects Jesus, attacks Jesus, kills Jesus? Is it God, or is it human beings? On the face of it, the only answer that makes sense is that it is human beings that Peter is talking about. Otherwise (if it is God who causes Christ to suffer unjustly), something goes terribly wrong in the sentences, “But when you do right and suffer for it and take it patiently, this is valued by God. For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps.” See the problem? Some people claim that the core of Christ’s suffering for us is his experience on the cross of substitutionary punishment and rejection at God’s hands. As this logic goes, since Jesus has experienced God’s undeserved wrath in our place, we can therefore be freed from suffering God’s deserved wrath and punishment. But that way of thinking clashes with the context and makes absurd Peter’s statement that Christ suffered “as an example, that we should follow in his steps.” Are we now to step forward for wrath and punishment from the Lord too? That makes absolutely no sense. Peter also says in 1 Pet. 4:13, “But rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed.” And Paul says that he wants to know the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings, and to become like him in his death (Php. 3:10), and he also says that in his sufferings at people’s hands he helps fill up in his flesh the measure of Christ’s sufferings (Col. 1:24). The only way that Peter and Paul can speak of a continuity between their sufferings and the sufferings of Christ is if they understand Christ’s sufferings in terms of his being rejected and persecuted by the hostile human race.
Let’s now go to the Old Testament and see if this bears out. The two most famous passages that Christians have always understood as prophetic of Jesus’ death are Psalm 22 and Isaiah 52-53.
Psalm 22
First, the setting. The psalmist prays in an agony of fear and dread to God, asking why God has left him in the hands of murderers. He asks for rescue from enemies who are in the process of attacking him (read together vv. 1, 2, 11, 19, 20, 21). What is his attitude? Does he say, “God, why are you doing this to me”? No, he says, “God, why are you allowing this to happen to me?” Who are the attackers? It is clear that they are human beings: “I am…scorned by people, and despised by the nation…” (vv. 6-7). His own countrypeople are not the literal killers, but they are cheering on the process, leering and gloating. He calls those who are physically attacking him “bulls,” “lions,” “dogs,” “a band of evil men,” “wild oxen.” They are the ones who “divide my clothing and throw dice for my clothes.” Is God seen as acting against the one who prays, even indirectly, through the agency of the human attackers? Absolutely not. After having prayed desperately, the psalmist breaks into joy and thanksgiving for being rescued by God:
…I will praise you!…You who fear the LORD, praise him!…for he has not despised or disdained the suffering of the afflicted one, nor has he hidden his face from him! He has listened to his cry for help! (vv. 22-24).
This is what the author of Hebrews is referring to when he says,
During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard for his reverent submission. (Heb. 5:7)
So, understanding Psalm 22 as a prophecy of the suffering and death of Jesus, the author of Hebrews would say clearly that the Father was not the killer of Jesus when he died on the cross, but his rescuer. Paradoxically, the Father rescues Jesus by being with him through his dying, rather than by keeping him from dying. Isaiah 57:1-2, following on in the context of Isaiah 53 (see below), speaks of this rescue-through-death:
The innocent are dying, and no one ponders it in his heart; devout people are taken away, and no one understands that the righteous are taken away in order to be spared from evil. Those who walk in integrity enter into peace; they find rest as they lie in death.
The same is said of Jesus’ followers in the Book of Revelation: “Write, Blessed are those who die in the Lord from now on! Yes, says the Spirit, so that they may rest from their labors. . .” (Rev. 14:13). As Jesus himself says from the cross in his dying moments, “Father, I am entrusting my spirit into your hands” (Lk. 23:46). This is a quotation from another psalm that is prophetic of Jesus’ sufferings on the cross: Psalm 31. Like Psalm 22, this psalm has moments in which the one praying wrestles in faith with a dread of God’s abandonment. But it ends this way: “Praise be to the LORD, for you showed your wonderful love to me when I was in a besieged city. In my alarm I said, ‘I am cut off from your sight!’; yet you heard my cry for mercy when I called to you for help” (vv. 21-22). God the Father is the loving rescuer here, not the wrathful perpetrator of the violence.
Isaiah 53
This passage is often called the song of the Suffering Servant. The one who is called “my servant” in this chapter is understood by Christians to be Jesus, who suffered for us on the cross. In this song, who and what is it that causes the servant to suffer? Isaiah says these things: “He was despised and forsaken by people…like one from whom people hide their faces, he was despised and we looked down on him.” “He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth…By oppression and judgment he was taken away.” “He was cut off out of the land of the living, his grave assigned to be with wicked men…although he had done no violence, and no dishonesty came from his mouth.” “He poured himself out to death, and was counted as a law-breaker, yet he himself bore the sin of many, and interceded against those who were breaking the law.” The plain sense of these statements is that the servant experienced rejection, misunderstanding, false accusation, attack and execution as a criminal at the hands of other human beings. Where is God in this scene? Do we discover God as the “behind the scenes” punisher of the servant? Let us read what Isaiah says about the servant:
How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those
Who bring good news,
Who proclaim peace,
Who bring excellent news,
Who proclaim salvation,
Saying to Zion, “Your God reigns as King!” …
The Lord has laid bare his holy arm
In the sight of all nations!
All the earth will see the salvation of our God!
…
See, my servant will act wisely;
He will be raised and lifted up and highly exalted.
Just as there were many who were appalled at him
…
Who has believed our news?
Who has had the arm of the Lord revealed to them?
He was despised and forsaken by people…
Like one from whom people hide their faces,
He was despised and we looked down on him.
Surely he was bearing our sickness,
And carrying our pains;
Yet we regarded him as one who was struck down,
Punished by God.
But he was pierced for our offenses,
Crushed for our sins:
The punishment that gave us wholeness was on him,
And by the whipping he received we are healed.
All of us have strayed from God like so many sheep;
Each and every one of us has turned away from God;
But the Lord has caused the wrongdoing of all of us to fall on him.
He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth;
He was led like a lamb to the slaughter,
And as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.
By oppression and judgment he was taken away;
Yet who of his generation considered
That he was cut off from the land of the living
For the transgression of my people, to whom the stroke was due?
Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him, putting him to grief,
[or: Yet the Lord was pleased with his wounded one, whom he had made to suffer]
[or, following the LXX, the Greek OT known by the first Christians: Yet the Lord wanted to cleanse him of his wound]
And though you [plural, indicating the readers] make his life a guilt offering,
He will see his offspring and prolong his days,
And the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand.
As a result of the anguish he experienced,
He will open his eyes and be satisfied.
By his experience the righteous one, my servant,
will declare many human beings innocent,
Having borne their sins.
Therefore I will give him the portion alongside
the greatest kings,
And he will take booty from the strongest.
For he made himself vulnerable to death
And was treated as a criminal;
Yet he was experiencing the violence of the human race
and praying for them-
It was they who were the criminals.
The picture here is deeply shocking. The scene opens with the picture of people running over the mountains with wonderful news, news that God is acting in a powerful way to save. We hear that “The Lord has bared his holy arm in the sight of all nations,” and we expect that we will now see the creator of the universe coming with sleeves rolled up, dealing crushing blows to the murderers and oppressors of this world. We expect to see a public display of God’s direct and awesome power to destroy evil. But the focus changes, and we hear of “my servant,” the cherished servant that the Lord loves, with whom the Lord is very pleased. Inexplicably, we hear that the servant has suffered terrible disfigurement and rejection, grief and undeserved punishment. Has the Lord turned against the Servant, attacking him for “our” sins? Not at all! The terrible reversal is that the Servant of the Lord is rejected by the very ones he came to serve and to save. He experiences sorrow, rejection, pain, false accusation at the hands of the human race, and it is he himself, the servant, in his steadfast love and forgiveness and intercession for the attackers, who embodies the powerful and holy arm of the Lord reaching out in salvation. God’s Arm is not exposed here in the act of reaching out to strike the rebellious, still less to strike the Servant, since the Arm is a symbol of the Servant himself. “To whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?” The “arm of God,” the personal saving power of God, is revealed to those who can recognize his awesome decision to face murder at the hands of humanity, in the person of the Servant. The Lord wounds the Servant, and makes him to suffer (v. 10) precisely by asking the Servant to represent God to us, and not to turn back before the consequences.
If we now recognize Jesus Christ in the Servant prophesied here, it is clear that Jesus saves us, the guilty ones, not by standing between us and the hostility of a wrathful God, but by standing for God before an angry, hostile us. He draws our very worst hostility for the very reason that he fully represents the loving God that we have rejected. In facing and making himself vulnerable to our hatred, he bears our sins, not only metaphorically, but literally, for we sin against him and express our murderous rejection of him towards his very body. He willingly chooses, in obedience to God the Father, to submit to our “man-handling” even to the point of dying at our hands, and in doing so he releases for us, the very perpetrators, an unstoppable power of forgiveness, healing and restoration.
This is the paradox of the cross: it was God’s plan and intention that the wounding and the death that Jesus experienced at our hands should be the saving encounter between ourselves and him. The cross is thus the proof of full forgiveness and the promise of healing. For how could we have proved ourselves more guilty? And how could he have gone further to prove his choice to proclaim us not guilty?
Now let’s go back again to the New Testament to check our understanding. John says this of the coming of Jesus into the world:
He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. (Jn 1:10-11)
This passage isn’t just about Jesus being rejected by the Jewish people; it’s about his rejection by the human race. This is what Peter and John are getting at when they pray, in the book of Acts,
You spoke through the Holy Spirit through the mouth of your servant, our father David: “Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers gather together against the Lord and against his Anointed One.” Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen.
Peter and John perceive behind the events of Good Friday a confrontation not just between God and some Jewish leaders, but with the whole hostile human race. John the author of Revelation sees this too, when he says,
Look, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him—indeed, those who pierced him!
And all the peoples of the earth will mourn because of him.
John here sees a universal application of the Old Testament prophecy of Zechariah (Zech. 13), who speaks about the day when God saves the city of Jerusalem (I am paraphrasing):
On that day…I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace, a spirit enabling them to ask for my help. They will look on me, the one they pierced, and they will mourn for me [literally, “him”] like one grieves for a first-born son who has died. That day there will be lots of weeping in Jerusalem…. The land will grieve, each family grieving by itself, husbands and wives by themselves,…all the families, all the men, all the women, each and every one, weeping.
On that day a fountain will be made available to the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem: a fountain of cleansing from sin and the stain of wrongdoing.
In Christ, we see God the pierced one, the God whose mercy and love drove him to endure being torn by the very ones he loved. That is the good news. The cross itself is the “fountain of cleansing” that God has appointed. It is the place of facing ourselves and the enemies that we have become towards our own creator. It is the place at which God has chosen to meet us, and to release for us God’s great power for repentance and reconciliation—not just reconciliation to God, but also to one another (Eph. 2:11-22). John says this:
God is love. This is how God showed God’s love among us: God sent God’s only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that God loved us and sent God’s Son to be the reconciling sacrifice for our sins. (1 John 4:8-10)
The thing that is worth noticing about this passage and all similar passages in the New Testament, is that Jesus is offered by God to us as a reconciling sacrifice (“propitiation”), and does not offer himself to God as a reconciling sacrifice. Various writers say that Jesus offered himself to God (e.g. Hebrews), but they say it in such a way that it is clearly not as someone who offers to undergo vicarious punishment or rejection from the hands of God. Hebrews says he underwent vicarious purification and refinement through suffering, to flesh out and to complete his identification with our need, and his flawlessly loving and forgiving nature as High Priest (Heb. 5:8-10). There is not a word in Hebrews about Jesus vicariously experiencing anger or condemning punishment (except from us—read Heb. 12:2-3). The New Testament writers agree that in his dying Jesus offered up the very life of his body, all of himself as a person, in love to God (as we are also commanded to do, Rom. 12:1). And God was infinitely pleased with that offering (see Eph. 5:2: “Christ loved us, and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God”).
In obedience, Jesus offered his sufferings at our hands to God as an outpouring of the inmost desire of his heart: that we would be forgiven and saved. In doing this, God called out to God, revealing in shocking public vulnerablity his desire for our wholeness and reconciliation.
Who Killed Jesus? Part 3: Substitutionary Atonement: How Does That Fit In?
Someone will say in response to all of these observations,
Surely the Bible says over and over again that Jesus died for us, that Jesus died in our place. If Jesus didn’t die in our place to satisfy God’s justice, then what do these kinds of statements mean? Haven’t you left out something at the very core of the atonement?
Over and over again we hear preachers insist that God is the sort who can’t let sin go unpunished because God is too just and righteous and holy. “We all deserve to die,” they shout at us, “and that’s why Jesus had to die in our place so the Father could forgive us. Sin demands punishment, according to God’s holy nature!”
Let me just say something that some may find a bit frightening. No matter who says it, no matter how often, and with how many implicit threats of eternal damnation, it’s not true that God is the sort that demands punishment for all offenses. Here is what the scripture says, when it reports God’s intimate and glorious self-revelation to Moses (Exod. 34:6-7, see the context, 33:18–34:8):
The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, overflowing with love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet God certainly does not let the guilty go free, causing the sins of the parents to visit their children and their children’s children, to the third and fourth generations.
The first and deepest thing that God chooses to reveal about himself is that God is forgiving and compassionate and loving. God’s innermost character is to show mercy and to desire restoration, not vengeance. God adds that sin has its consequences nonetheless, and God accepts responsibility for this. God has made the world a place where personal forgiveness is always available to the repentant, yet each person (the sinner and the sinned-against) must deal for themselves with the temptation to sin. For example, if my father abused me as a child, God can and will forgive him if he asks for forgiveness; yet I will still be responsible to do my work of forgiving my father, otherwise I will pass on that abuse to my children in one form or another. So says Jesus: “Don’t judge, or you yourself will be judged. Forgive, and you will be forgiven” (Matt. 7:1-2). God therefore promises to forgive the repentant, but does not promise to release the knock-on consequences of their actions, since this requires the free cooperation of those who have been sinned against. Sin can be like a cascaded fountain that spills over from one generation to another, or from one person or group to another. Yet at all times God is ready to forgive those who repent and who are willing to join him in that forgiveness. Over and over in the New Testament we hear words like those of Jesus:
For if you forgive others when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you don’t forgive those who sin against you, your heavenly Father will not forgive your sins (Matt. 6:14).
Unforgiveness traps us in sin and its consequences. But our unforgiveness does not trap those whom God has forgiven. Suppose, for example, that someone has severely injured me in a fight. Suppose also that they repent of having fought with me and injured me. But they cannot restore my health; only God can, whether by healing or resurrection. Perhaps they will pray for me and do what they can to make amends. But suppose, whether now or in the resurrection, I go to God and demand that my enemy (who is only my enemy because I continue to insist on considering him an enemy, not because he is now my enemy in his own heart) be injured just as I was injured by him. “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,” I say: it is not fair that he should be healthy, but I should be disabled. God says, let me heal you, let me make it up to you, with the same generosity I showed to him. But I say, no, what I want is for him to suffer, and I won’t accept anything else. I want fairness, equal suffering for both of us.
At this point, God says, you can have your equal suffering, if you insist. But you can’t have the suffering of the one who injured you, since I forgave him. My Son Jesus has suffered in place of the one you want to take revenge on. If you really want to insist on the full consequences of wrongdoing without mercy, this is my agreement that your demand will be satisfied. But I myself will do the suffering in the person of my beloved Son, so that no one can lay a hand on those I have pardoned.
Do you see the difference between this kind of substitution and the kind often put forward by preachers? They assume that God’s holiness and justice consist in God’s being fundamentally unforgiving and legalistic. They imply that God at the core of God’s nature must insist on taking revenge for wrongdoing, and that therefore God had to punish Jesus in order to forgive us. The Bible (and Jesus in particular) says that God is fundamentally forgiving, willing to relinquish the consequences of wrongdoing, both to forgive the perpetrator and to heal the injured and reconcile both to one another. Jesus therefore suffers not to neutralize God’s desire to harm us, but to express to the ultimate degree God’s desire to forgive us and help us, in the face of those who would insist on our harm. Jesus is a substitute and suffers in our place not to appease a vengeful God but to silence a vengeful humanity.
Who Killed Jesus? Part 4: A Closer Look at Three Difficult Passages
In the first three parts of this paper I have said the bulk of what I want to say about who really killed Jesus, and what his death accomplished. There are obviously dozens more references to what Jesus did for us on the cross in the New Testament, but it would be tedious to attempt to comment on them all. Instead, if you have found these thoughts helpful, I leave it to you to discover and rediscover other passages in the light of any insights that you have picked up here. I will, however, deal briefly with three passages that most people will probably stumble over.
1. 2 Corinthians 5:21
…God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And therefore God has committed to us the message of reconciliation… We implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God. God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God.
Most of the words of this passage go entirely and obviously with the grain of what has been said above. The movement of God in the death of Christ (see 2 Cor. 5:15), Paul says, was a movement of reaching out to us, the enemies, through Christ, in compassion and reconciliation. It was not a wrathful turning against Christ in substitutionary condemnation. But the words “God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us” seem at first look to be out of character with the rest of the passage. What is going on?
In my understanding, Paul here is playing poetically with the word “sin,” in the full knowledge that the Greek Old Testament (the Septuagint, pronounced Sep-too-uh-jint) uses it on certain key occasions to translate the Hebrew word hatta’at. The word hatta’at is paradoxical because this very same word means “sin” in some contexts, but “a sin offering” in other contexts. (Careful use of a concordance will confirm this.) A sin offering is an animal sacrifice that releases complete forgiveness for a person who has sinned against God. So the person familiar with either the Greek or the Hebrew Old Testament will hear Paul saying, here, “he made him who knew no sin (hatta’at) to be a sin offering (hatta’at) for us…”
In the light of what we have seen, this makes spectacularly good sense. For who is it that is supposed to kill the sin offering? Is it the priest, symbolically representing an angry God who wants to take revenge on you, the sinner, but transfers God’s displeasure onto the animal you bring? No! It is you, the one who has sinned, who come before God, bringing the innocent victim, and you personally slay the animal (see Lev. 4). The sin offering has done nothing against you, yet it dies in your place, for your sin, at your hands, and you stand accepted, completely forgiven by God. To me this is a reflection, a parable of the cross, cast into the deepest grain of the sacrificial system of Israel.
2. Galatians 3:13
All who rely on observing the law [in order to be accepted by God] are under a curse, for it is written: “Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law.” Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: “Cursed is every one who is hung on a tree.”
Most will agree, I think, that this passage on first look appears to be saying God has cursed Christ instead of us. There is a lot to disentangle here, but I just want to focus on one or two simple things. First, let’s look at the Scripture Paul is quoting in the last sentence above:
If a man guilty of a capital offense is put to death and his body is hung on a tree, you must not leave his body on the tree overnight. Be sure you bury him the same day, because anyone who is hung on a tree is a curse to the LORD. You must not desecrate the land the LORD God is giving you as an inheritance (Deut. 21:22-23).
First, what is a curse? In the Bible, a curse is usually one of two things: (1) something horrible that can happen to a person or group, or (2) a verbal description and/or threat of some form of (1). When meaning (2) is employed, the context often makes it clear that saying the curse or hearing the curse said makes you responsible for understanding that the horrible experience or condition it describes is going to happen to you if you don’t act in good faith in regard to some agreement you are undertaking. For example, in the section from Galatians above, Paul quotes the following passage from Deuteronomy:
The Levites shall recite to all the people of Israel in a loud voice: “…Cursed is the person who does not uphold the words of this law by carrying them out.” (“Then all the people shall say…”) “Amen!” (Deut. 27:14-15, 26)
Chapter 28 of Deuteronomy lays out a whole selection of “blessings and curses,” that is, descriptions of wonderfully good things or horrible things that will happen to people, depending on whether they either uphold or turn against the agreement of loyalty and justice that they have just undertaken with God. Paul says in Galatians that Jesus “redeemed us from the curse of the Law,” by which he means precisely this set of curses. In another epistle Paul pictures Christ’s victory over the curses—the retributive consequences—of the Law in this way:
And you, being dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God has made alive together with Jesus, having forgiven you all trespasses, having wiped out the handwriting of requirements that was against us, which was contrary to us. And God has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross. Having disarmed principalities and powers, God made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in it (Col. 2:13-15).
You can see from this passage that God (or God’s wrath) is not the enemy that the cross defeats. On one hand it is true that the Law lays out just retribution for wrongdoing: “the handwriting of requirements that was against us, which was contrary to us.” On the other hand, there is not one word in the Law or one principle in God’s nature that says God cannot sovereignly determine to forgive instead of imposing the last letter of condemnation. Jesus suffers not to procure God’s mercy, but to express it, by silencing every accuser that would argue against God’s mercy.
Getting back to Galatians, what does Paul mean when he says that Jesus “became a curse”?
In the terminology of the Bible, “to be cursed” is to be under the verbal threat of horrible things happening to you, or to be experiencing horrible things, especially things that have previously been threatened as curses. On the other hand, “to become a curse” means to be a textbook example of a person who experiences horrible circumstances. To “be a curse,” in other words, is to be more or less in the worst possible situation. You become a curse when you embody a human experience so awful that your case immediately comes to mind when someone wants to wish a bad fate on somebody: “May you end up like so-and-so!” (see Isa. 65:15; Jer. 24:9; 25:18; 26:6; 42:18; 44:8, 12, 22; 49:13).
This, I believe, is the sense of Deuteronomy 21:22-23, which Paul quotes in Gal. 3:13. According to this text, a criminal is not to be left hanging on a tree overnight, because such a person is “A curse to the LORD.” It is vitally important to understand that this is not the same thing as being cursed by the LORD. There is not some mysterious rule that says that you will be cursed by God if ever God should see you hung on a tree. God is not the sort who enjoys adding insult to injury. Moreover, in what way would the alleged cursing by God here make it inappropriate for the person’s corpse to remain hanging overnight? All of that kind of thinking has simply gone down the wrong track. The point is that God regards being killed and having your dead body hung up for public ridicule as being the worst possible state of degradation and humiliation. To be in such a state, to the LORD, is to have been made “a curse” in the sense discussed above. It is a horrible fate, a fate beyond all bounds of human decency. God commands, therefore, that no one’s corpse should be left hanging overnight, because to do so would be to go beyond the maximum allowable penalty in punishing the person. For such treatment would be an insult to the inherent dignity of the person as a human being, a dignity which is not forfeited and which is not to be denied, even if a person has committed a capital offense. Such an insult to the dignity of an executed individual becomes an insult to God, to the community as a whole, and, indeed, an injury to the dignity of the land itself:
His body shall not remain overnight on the tree, but you shall surely bury him that day, so that you don’t defile the land which the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance; for he who is hanged is a curse to God (Deut. 21:23).
In view of this background, let us return and have a look at Galatians 3:13 again:
All who rely on observing the law [in order to be accepted by God] are under a curse, for it is written: “Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law.” Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: “Cursed is every one who is hung on a tree.”
What did Jesus Christ experience on the cross? Was it God’s displeasure? Was it God’s rejection, God’s punishment, God’s hostility, God’s “curse”? Neither Paul nor any other New Testament author ever says these things. In Galatians 3:13 Paul is saying that the treatment Jesus experienced at the hands of the human race was the worst possible treatment that any human being could be given. For the crime of living out God’s total, passionate love towards us, he was executed in total disgrace. Stripped naked and nailed to a cross with iron spikes, he was hung up publicly to die amidst insults and sneering (see Matt. 27:39; Mk 15:26). Jesus of Nazareth experienced the ultimate form of degradation that is possible to suffer at the hands of other human beings. The gospel stories tell us that Jesus had sensed all along that he was destined to be rejected, mistreated and killed, yet he went forward and willingly gave up every last ounce of his dignity and power and submitted to the experience of being “a curse” for us. It was not the Father that cursed Jesus and subjected him to “being a curse.” It was we ourselves.
3. Matthew 27:46 || Mark 15:34
And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” that is, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”
This cry of agony by Jesus is a word-for-word quotation of the prayer of Ps. 22:1. We saw earlier in this paper that the whole of Psalm 22 is a prayer of passionate faith by a person in desperate distress. Linking Jesus’ words with Heb. 5.7 as well, we see him crying out to God to save him from his terrible physical agony, which he is suffering at the hands of hateful human beings (Ps. 22:1-18). Jesus’ prayer is both heard and answered (Heb. 5.7; cf. Ps. 22:24) in two senses. First, he has a mercifully swift death after he prays this, which releases him from his sufferings. Secondly, Jesus’ prayer is heard because his death admits him to Paradise and the loving arms of his Father (Lk. 23:43-46).
Here is the issue. In the Old Testament and the Jewish world-view, if God is with you, you win in battle, and your enemies cannot hurt you. Conversely, if you lose, or your enemies succeed in harming you, then God has not been with you. According to this old biblical definition, God “forsook” Jesus in the sense that he did not rescue him from the power of the enemies who were persecuting him. Yet in the new reality, which Jesus personally forged as our Pioneer, the Father rescued Jesus not by keeping him away from persecution, but by being with him, perfecting him through persecution and death:
In the days of his flesh, when he had offered up prayers and supplications, with vehement cries and tears to him who was able to save him from death, and was heard because of his godly fear, though he was a Son, yet he learned obedience by the things which he suffered. And having been perfected, he became the author of eternal salvation to all who obey him, called by God as High Priest “according to the order of Melchizedek” (Heb. 5:7-10)
Therefore we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. For consider him who endured such hostility from sinners against himself, so that you will not become weary and discouraged in your souls. You have not yet resisted to bloodshed, striving against sin. And you have forgotten the exhortation which speaks to you as to sons: “My son, don’t despise the chastening of the Lord, nor be discouraged when you are rebuked by God; for whom the Lord loves he chastens, and scourges every son whom he receives.” (Heb. 12:1-6).
The great paradox, in relation to the Hebrew world-view (and ours), is that God’s presence with you may lead you into suffering persecution and having to lay down your life, not “victory,” as humanly conceived (see Isa. 57:1-2, following on in the context of Isaiah 53). Jesus has accomplished the forging of a new pattern: to endure persecution because of obedience to God is stronger than “winning” by human might.